This is the season of light and hope. We dared to dream that we were past the worst. The pardoning of Hunter Biden looked like the last act of the senile and corrupt President Joe Biden. The peevish race-baiting of perma-President Barack Obama is confounded, the Democrats’ antidemocratic schemes hoist by their own petard. President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees vary by ideology, but all of them want to fix a broken federal bureaucracy and regain the trust of the public.

The “Trump effect” has been at work since the night of Nov. 5. In the month after the November elections, investors pumped more than $140 billion into U.S. equity funds, the largest inflow in any month since 2000. The herd of independent-minded commentators has suddenly decided it knew all along that the 2016 election result was a watershed. You are no longer a conspiracist if you say that COVID-19 was manmade in Wuhan and that federal agencies funded much of the research and then hid their tracks.